An Ecumenical Partnership with Habitat for Humanity
Updated 02/24/02
This is a series of articles by T. Reuther, sharing memories that symbolize our common attachment to home. And help us remember the spirit of Holy Hammers.
Holy Hammers is a local partnership of eleven suburban churches: Centennial United Methodist (Roseville), Corpus Christi Catholic Church (Roseville), Christ the King Lutheran (White Bear Lake), Falcon Heights United Church of Christ (Falcon Heights), Incarnation Lutheran (North Oaks), Lutheran Church of the Resurrection (Shoreview), New Brighton United Church of Christ (New Brighton), North Como Presbyterian (Roseville), Presbyterian Church of the Way (Shoreview), St. Michael's Lutheran Church (Roseville) and Shepherd of the Hills (Shoreview).
We mark our life passages by the homes we have owned. Each house comes to represent memories of family, of the good and the bad.
During February, I want to share memories from my family. As we move thorough this month, we will be adding new figures to our Habitat House that will in some way symbolize our common attachment to home.
This Sunday, we add the figures of two women, carrying lumber.
My Grandparent's house burned in 1937. My mother got the younger children out. Men from the lumber millon their way home, tired from their labors, pitched in and hand carried most of the belongings out, well before the firemen arrived.
My Grandmother, of sturdy pioneer stock, moved her family of 7 into a chicken coop, where they lived through the winter until repairs were finished.
So, like those tired working men who pitched in to save what could be saved, the two women carrying lumber symbolize the power and responsibility of our community to help establish and to preserve the home.
T. Reuther
February 17, 2002
Added 02/23/02
My Grandfather loved the Fourth of July. He always had an ample supply of fireworks on that day.
Grandpa build his own houses. Studs were usually 2 foot on center, to keep the costs down, and he usually used a 2x4 where any engineer would require a 2x6 or 2x8. In those days, there was precious little attention to the niceties of things like building codes.
Grandpa had just finished the roof of his new house on the Fourth, and everyone as waiting for him to start the fireworks. He got sidetracked, and as family myth has it, my uncle Bob decided to set off "just one."
Like the classic slapstick comedy, Bob let a spark get into the large box of fireworks, and they all went off at once. As everyone ducked behind something for cover, the explosions caught the new roof on fire, and burned it away.
Grandma repeated this story with tears and laughter when I was a small child. Uncle Bob was killed in the last week of WW II in Europe. The home I remember in Canby, Oregon was the home he never returned to.
Today, we add a figure of an older man and a boy. The older man is making a cut following blueprints and is instructing the youth.
This symbolized the teaching and learning nature of our Habitat efforts. We not only teach and learn new skills, but we teach youth what Christian faith looks like in action.
Grandma's home in Canby, Oregon remains a special place in my memory. We would trvel there from seattle and arrive very late at night. Grandma would tuck us in warm beds in the dormers. Often, I would fall asleep listening to the whistle of distant trains, or to the soothing sound of driving rain on shingles.
The house had no central heating; a lone oil-burning stove in the living room struggled to heat everything by convection.
Grandma raised prize-winning rabbints. She supplid all the German restaurants in Portland, Oregon with hassenpfeffer. We always ate well at Grandma's.
On the nearly 5 acres they owned, she had an extensive garden, an orchard, and a huge old bing cherry tree. I used to climb with my cousins. We used to gorge ourselves on those cherries until the sun-warmed juice ran down our chins.
Grandma died alone and without any oil in the stove in 1978. Involved in my own life cycle raising a young family, I did not return to the house in Canby until it was too late.
Everything had been obliterated. Nothing at all remained, not a tree, not a stone. It is now a paved-over church parking lot.
So I hold everything of this last house in my heart.
Today, we add the figure of a person climbing a ladder, burdened with a square of shingles slung over the shoulder.
This figure represents the journey upward, both spiritual and social, we all must undertake, whatever pulls us down. A home is the anchor for a better life. Thisis the story Habitat owners repeat over and over. But it isn't just the owners who climb that ladder to something better. Holy Hammers offers an opportunity to cange lives forever for the better.
